In a desertscape in Brazil, science brings farms to bountiful life

When José Rodrigues do Santos first saw the enormous canyons in Gilbués, in Brazil’s Piauí state, he didn’t imagine that he would spend the rest of his life there. He had walked some 20 kilometers (12 miles) across a red sea of desertified land from the place where he was born to arrive in the heart of Gilbués with his family.

The red landscape here is like something out of a science-fiction film. That’s what makes the occasional pocket of green peeping through the raw earth such a surprise.

“The land needs to be cared for, just like we do. It’s a living thing too,” says Santos, better known as Zé Capemba in these parts. He tells of the difficulties involved in working the dry soil, including having to carry water every day. But things are much better today than they were a few years ago, he says. “Our well and the technology improved our life a lot.”

Gilbués is located in one of the four main geographical zones currently undergoing desertification according to the Brazilian government. All which are located in the semiarid northeast of the country, an 805-square-kilometer expanse (311-square-mile) expanse of degraded Caatinga dry forest straddling 14 municipalities in Piauí and home to some 149,000 people.

The Gameleiro, a creek, runs through Zé Capemba’s land. Its course has been altered by the large gullies resulting from the intense erosion process underway here.

Rain is one of the main factors driving this process. Because the landscape is already vulnerable, intense bursts of rainfall and the resulting flash floods carry away nutrients from the soil, doing even more damage to the earth and worsening the erosion. “Here, the force of the water has an erosive effect on the soil, which we call hydric erosion,” says Dalton Macambira, a professor at the Federal University of Piauí.

The climate, the contour of the land and the soil in Gilbués all naturally tend to degrade, but it’s the human activity in the region — especially deforestation for cattle pasture and for timber — that has accelerated the desertification process. And yet, the people here manage to produce life.

An oasis in a red earth landscape

Zé Capemba is a cowboy; he herded cattle during the years when he and his wife, Zilmar Barbosa dos Santos, raised their 10 children. Their third daughter, Maria Lúcia, is married to Francisco Washington Junior, who farms one of the green oases in this red territory.

The young couple’s land produces a bounty of food. Every morning, they harvest lettuce, carrots, garlic, onions, corn, beans and other produce. “It used to be very hard to work here,” Washington says. “When I came to this place, no one believed I would be able to grow anything. But now — just look! Every day I come out and manage to pick food for my family with enough left over to sell.”

Zé Capemba’s son-in-law was responsible for the transformation of a 15-hectare (37-acre) plot of land. Before he came to Malhadas, as this region is called, the land had no value because of the lack of vegetation, the presence of enormous gullies, and the belief that the soil had no nutrients.

In fact, what was lacking was good land management. According to soil and plant nutrition specialist Fabriciano Neto, lithic soils like those found in Malhadas are rich in phosphorous but poor in nitrogen. By compensating for these characteristics, plants will grow. “In chemical terms, this soil is rich; what is missing is the physical part: machinery to optimize the farmer’s work and specialized technical assistance,” Neto says.

As we walk across his property, Washington points out different plots of his land and the actions he took to improve the farming there. Aside from planting trees inside the gullies to help check soil erosion, he also built barriers to help level out the land. Over time, the area of level lend on which he can farm continues to increase.

Another technique he has used is silaging, a way of storing and fermenting corn for a longer period so he can feed his cattle. First, he uses a tractor to harvest and grind the corn, which he then covers with a tarp and a layer of soil. The stored grain ensures that, even in the dry season, he has quality, nutrient-rich feed for his animals.

Feasible farming

It wasn’t always possible to do quality farming in Gilbués. It was through a Ministry of Environment project aimed at combating desertification that Washington and other local farmers gained access to the modern technology and tools they needed to manage the soil and develop their farming.

The ministry’s Research Center for the Recuperation of Degraded Land and Combat of Desertification (Nuperade) turned its focus to Gilbués in 2006, when a pioneering partnership was created between farmers, specialists and researchers.

This municipality was the only place where the program was implemented. It continued until 2016, hosting studies and tests on ways to control degradation and recuperate already degraded areas. The initiative involved projects from the PAN-Brasil, the national action program to tackle desertification and drought.

“We have improved 1,000% since 2006,” Washington says. “Everything I do here, I learned at Nuperade. And I have been improving on that knowledge ever since. We began here in Gilbués producing 20 bags of corn per hectare. Today we produce 120. Today I can say we are one of the most productive cities in the state of Piauí.”

No one knows just why Nuperade was shut down. That same year, 2016, then-president Dilma Rousseff was impeached and the heads of some ministries were replaced. That included Izabella Teixeira, the environment minister since 2011, who was replaced by Sarney Filho.

According to Gilbués City Hall adviser José Marlos, there are some prospects for starting up activities at Nuperade headquarters again, located in the rural area of the municipality. These might include projects such as biofertilizer production, and visits by student members of the NGO S.O.S. Gilbués to learn about the experiments conducted here in the past. We visited the headquarters, which was shuttered and looked abandoned. There were animals inside the property.

Fruits of the project

Francisco Washington convinced a friend, Absalão Teles da Silva Neto, that he should buy land in the Malhadas to grow corn and raise animals. “The advantage in Malhadas is that the land is already bare, no trees. So you just get a machine working on it right away. With the knowledge and skills we acquired at Nuperade, farming here became much easier. But you have to have machinery — it’s impossible to do by hand.”

Absalão’s land lies in one of the most critically desertified parts of Gilbués; the path to his home stands out as a green trail in the middle of a bone-dry landscape. Still, he says buying land in Malhadas was worthwhile because today the region is extremely productive.

Enias de Carvalho Neto is the beneficiary of another Nuperade experiment: fish farming, using the natural gullies as ponds to raise fish. Carvalho owns a butcher shop and says many of his customers request fish. “I sell the most during Holy Week. We always run out of fish then. But I have fish customers every day,” he says.

Carvalho runs two fish ponds, each about 100 meters (330 feet) wide, where he raises a type of fish called tambatinga, a cross between two Amazon-native fish: tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum) and piratinga (Piaractus brachypomus), both from the same family as piranhas. Carvalho calls his fish “country fish” because they eat commercial feed only in the beginning when they arrive as fry. Over the next eight months of growth and fattening, they eat only leftover food scraps from what the family eats on the farm.

Even with the technical knowledge that Nuperade provided, some natural factors are vital for a crop to be fruitful. One is rain — the right amount of it. Too much rain can destroy an entire year’s work.

Edvar Tavares Rodrigues, on the other hand, lost part of his corn crop because of too little rain. Even with the help of his two sons, their corn field didn’t produce as much as it should have. He says the time he spent at Nuperade was very worthwhile, but that it’s difficult as an independent farmer to buy the supplies and tools he needs to care for the soil and the crop. He also notes the hard physical labor involved and the difficulty convincing his sons to work with him on the farm. “We share everything here. This year, we bought a motorcycle so they can go into town and come back, but it’s hard to stick around here without much perspective of things getting better.”

But the seeds planted by Nuperade continue to sprout in Gilbués, transforming the landscape and creating alternatives for those fighting to develop their part of this sea of red earth.

 
Banner image: A reforested plot of land in the middle of the desert landscape of Gilbués, southern Piauí state. Image by Rafael Martins for Mongabay.

This story was reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and first published here on our Brazil site on June 10, 2024.